The Tie That Binds(8)

But at least with both a boy and a girl on hand now to help, Roy could believe enough in tomorrow to begin adding on to his original quarter section, and he did. God only knows he was frugal enough. In fact, he was about so tight as to be able actually to squeeze blood from the turnips Ada grew in the family garden. As for his farming, he would do things like go on tying his machinery together with baling wire and patching it up however he could, rather than do anything as rash as to buy something new. Before he would do a thing that crazy he had to be dead certain that baling wire and goddamns wouldn’t work anymore. He never spent five cents on himself or his wife or his kids, and what he made he saved, and then about once every eight or nine years he would suck in his belt, spit, and then finally buy another quarter section of nearby Holt County sand for Lyman to help him sweat over. So in time, Roy acquired quite a lot of land. He had some Hereford cows with calves on grass, and a few Shorthorns to milk, besides the wheat and cornfields to till and plant and harvest.

Meanwhile, Edith and Lyman were growing up out here seven miles from Holt, and they were about all each other had. As kids, Edith says, they slept together in a double straw-tick bed in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and wrapping their legs around one another to keep warm they told themselves stories about what they were going to do when they were big enough and free enough of the farm and their father to do those great things. Well, they never did them. But during the days when they were kids, in the few hours left when they weren’t hoeing beans or milking cows or churning butter or shoveling shit out the milk-barn window, they played those games farm kids play behind haystacks and deep in tall cornfields. In the winter they went to school a little bit.

When Edith started school in 1903, when she started riding the three miles farther south to the converted chicken house with the foul two-hole privy behind it, riding on one of the played-out workhorses her father still kept and whose back was so broad that riding him her legs stuck straight out sideways, the boy who lived down the road from her was already in his seventh and next-to-last year of school. I believe he was a help to her—John Roscoe was—and I believe he took care of her. I know they rode to school together, the thirteen-year-old boy with stiff black hair and the six-year-old girl in high-topped shoes that had been her mother’s, and I know every school day for two years they rode home together. He also protected her during lunch hour and recess, never mind what the other kids said about Johnny has a girl friend, ain’t she sweet, when she takes her boots off, he tickles her feet, because I believe that’s when and how what later happened—nineteen years later—started. With just that much.

Then that ended. The two years were up; he had finished the eighth grade, so for quite a while John Roscoe and Edith Goodnough didn’t see a lot of each other except during harvest, even if they lived just a half mile apart.

Neighboring families don’t visit much when one of the neighbors is Roy Goodnough.

Anyway, Lyman was old enough to start school then, so Edith rode double on the broken-down workhorse to school with him. But that didn’t last very long, either. Lyman only went to school for four or five years, and Edith herself never finished the eighth grade. That has always bothered her, too. I believe she thinks things might have ended different than they did if she had finished the eighth grade.

“But what was I going to do?” she says. “He wouldn’t allow it. It was a waste of time.”

By “he” she means, of course, Roy.

WILL, then, what more do I need to tell you about those fifteen years that passed between the last two times Ada wanted the woman down the road to come? Just this, I suppose: in the pictures taken of Edith and Lyman between 1899 and 1914, Edith is a beautiful girl, with her mother’s big eyes and brown hair and enough of her father in her to make her stand up straight and face the camera full on. Also, in one of the pictures I’ve seen in the Goodnough family album, Edith has her arm around Lyman. He is standing there almost as if he’s been tucked into the folds of her long skirt, like he’s some kind of wet-combed cocker spaniel. Lyman looks scared and half protected at the same time. I don’t think he felt that way just when somebody was taking his picture.

But it was about Ada that I wanted to tell you now. I’ve already said how this country was a shock to her, how she had to live under a tarp for three or four months after already living in a wagon for three or four weeks, and how as thin as she was she still had to carry water in yoked pails for a half mile every day until her husband found time to dig their own well. She wasn’t made for that kind of life. And even if she had been, she was still married to a man like Roy Goodnough. She was bound by law to a hickory stick.

So in the same family album, while Edith and Lyman are growing up, their mother, Ada, seems to be sinking down. In one picture after another, she looks smaller, shorter, thinner. Her cheeks suck into bone, her thin brown hair turns to sparse gray. By 1913, in what must be the last picture taken of her, she stands barely as tall as Roy’s shoulder, and he was no more than five feet eight himself. In the picture I’m talking about, Ada looks like she might be her husband’s mother. About all you can make out of her face in the grainy photograph is her big eyes, staring not at whoever it was that held the camera, but away, off towards something in the distance.

Then in 1914, in August, in the hottest month of the year in Holt County, she got sick. They say it was the flu, and people did die of the flu then. But I believe, and Edith says, that it was more than just a virus bug that killed her. It was all those years of looking east; it was almost two decades of being married to Roy. Once, when her own mother died, she had gone back home to Johnson County on the train, and she had stayed so long after the funeral that Roy had had to go out and bring her back. She never went a second time. Now, on the High Plains of Colorado, she lay up there in the second-story bedroom, with the windows open to catch any breeze there was, sweating and burning up with what maybe only one of her family still believed was just flu fever. So it was almost the same story again. It was almost like the two times she had delivered babies there in that same bedroom. Only it was August this time, and instead of her arms and legs going rigid as sticks, she seemed as weak as water now. She didn’t make much of a bump under the sweat-soaked sheets. She didn’t move.